Display devices which are intended to provide an immersive experience normally allow a user to turn his head and experience a corresponding change in the scene which is displayed. Head mounted displays sometimes support 360 degree viewing in that a user can turn around while wearing a head mounted display with the scene being displayed changing as the user's head position changes.
With such devices a user should be presented with a scene that was captured in front of a camera position when looking forward and a scene that was captured behind the camera position when the user turns completely around. While a user may turn his head to the rear, at any given time a user's field of view is normally limited to 120 degrees or less due to the nature of a human's ability to perceive a limited field of view at any given time.
In order to support 360 degrees of view, a 360 degree scene may be captured using multiple cameras with the images being combined to generate the 360 degree scene which is to be made available for viewing.
It should be appreciated that a 360 degree view includes a lot more image data than a simple forward view which is normally captured, encoded for normal television and many other video applications where a user does not have the opportunity to change the viewing angle used to determine the image to be displayed at a particular point in time.
Given transmission constraints, e.g., network data constraints, associated with content being streamed, it may not be possible to stream the full 360 degree view in full high definition video to all customers seeking to receive and interact with the content. This is particularly the case where the content is stereoscopic content including image content intended to correspond to both left eye views and right eye views to allow for a 3D viewing effect.
In view of the above discussion it should be appreciated that there is a need for methods and apparatus for supporting encoding and/or streaming of content in a manner which allows an individual user to be supplied with a wide viewing area, so that the playback device has image data available should a user turn his/her head to view a different portion of the environment while satisfying data transmission constraints.